Physicists who fancy a flutter

News & Analysis: December 2006

The age-old practice of betting on science is alive and well among modern physicists. Martin Griffiths spoke to a few of the gambling fraternity

Earlier this year Jorge Hirsch believed he had found a flaw in the reigning "BCS" theory of low-temperature superconductivity, claiming that in certain circumstances it violates Lenz's law of electromagnetism. The University of California San Diego theorist was keen to put his claim to the test but no experimentalist was willing to take him up on it. To drum up interest and collect "seed money" for an experiment Hirsch turned to a novel solution. He put out a challenge on his website, asking for 500 physicists who did not believe him to bet $100 each that the experiment would prove him wrong and so verify BCS theory.

On the money

Hirsch is far from the first physicist to fancy a flutter. As far back as 1600, Johannes Kepler bet that he could deduce the equation for the orbit of Mars around the Sun within a week. Unfortunately, it took him five years. In the 20th century, researchers at Bell Labs kept a betting book in the tearoom for decades, recording wagers on physics, politics and economics. In the 1980s physicists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre in California established a similar book, recording, for example, that theorist Michael Peskin won a dinner for four after betting with Sidney Drell on the existence and mass of the top quark.

Among today's physicists, Stephen Hawking is known as something of an enthusiastic gambler. Two years ago he famously lost a bet to John Preskill of the California Institute of Technology when he admitted that information can escape from a black hole, something he had previously held to be impossible. Hawking was successful, however, in his bet with Gordon Kane of the University of Michigan that the Higgs boson would not be discovered at the Large Electron Positron Collider experiment at CERN, and he looks well on his way to winning a similar bet regarding the discovery of the particle at the Tevatron collider at Fermilab.

Indeed, particle physics seems to provide rich pickings for physics gamblers, and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is due to switch on next year, is inspiring plenty of speculation. Tommaso Dorigo, a particle physicist at Padova University in Italy, has bet $1000 on his weblog (dorigo.wordpress.com) that no physics "beyond the Standard Model" will be discovered at the LHC by the end of 2010. The bet was taken up by fellow particle physicist Gordon Watts and by string theorist Jacques Distler.

Long bets

But why do physicists like to gamble? In Dorigo's case, it acts as a sort of insurance policy: although he thinks he will win the bet, he says he would be much happier if he had to pay out. Indeed, for many the bets are just a bit of fun. But bets can also stem from real academic animosity and the desire to humiliate your opponents by having them "put their money where their mouth is" and fail.

One of the most famous examples is the bet in 1980 between economist Julian Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich on the price of commodities – Ehrlich predicting that over the following decade the prices of five particular metals would rise, whereas Simon believed the prices would fall. With all five dropping in price by 1990, Ehrlich was forced to pay up.

Inspired by such bets, Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, set up the Long Bets Foundation in 2001, which encourages bets lasting longer than two years on issues of importance to science or society. Of the physics-related predictions, science author John Horgan has bet physics popularizer and string theorist Michio Kaku $2000 that no-one will have won a Nobel prize for work on a unified theory of physics by 2020.

But while Long Bets has allowed some big names the chance to be able to showcase their ideas, another website hopes to make useful predictions by aggregating the opinions of many anonymous users. Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, who originally studied physics, invented the concept of "idea futures" in 1990, setting a "market value" for a particular idea by allowing people to buy the ideas they believe in and sell the ones they do not. This concept was put into practice on the Foresight Exchange (www.ideosphere.com), where as claims are bought and sold using play money, their trading price rises and falls between 0 (impossible) and 1 (certain). For example, the claim that the cosmological constant is non-zero is currently trading at 0.93, but cold fusion by 2015 is at just 0.15.

Tom Bell, an American lawyer, wants to set up an ideas market with real money. He envisages the market prices of ideas on the exchange being used by the media as a reality check on scientific claims. The idea does have precedent – in 2003 the US government set up an ideas market on foreign policy inspired by Hanson's work. However, the market was cancelled within a day, amidst a media furore over the ethical implications of betting on assassinations and terrorist atrocities.

Odds on

The recent crackdown on online gambling in the US may put a spanner in the works of ideas markets. Indeed, the UK is one of the few countries where non-sports betting is legal: a fact that was taken advantage of in 2004 by betting firm Ladbrokes. They offered odds on a series of scientific propositions, including the discovery of the Higgs boson and of life on Saturn's moon Titan. The bets proved popular, and punters particularly fancied the 500-1 odds offered against the discovery of gravitational waves by 2010. Indeed, a rush of interest forced the odds down to just 10-1 by the end of the two-week trial. So far, Ladbrokes have not had to pay out on any of the wagers. Meanwhile, all Hirsch wants to do is get his experiment done. Unfortunately, he has so far raised only $340. "In the field of superconductivity, people seem very good at 'post-dicting' but not so good at predicting the result of experiments," he says. "After the experiment is done there will be lots of 'predictions', whatever its result is." But what happens if he raises the money, carries out the experiment, but then loses the wager? "As our President says, 'I won't answer hypotheticals'. I won't lose."

About the author

Martin Griffiths is Reviews and Careers Editor of Physics World

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